My Favourite Found Footage Movies

The real reason why i'm single, is because I have so many mockumentaries and found footage movies  i n  m y   h e a r t , that there isn't space for anything else.

I decided to put together a little “Top 10”, but with fewer entries than a top 10 would have, cause I also wished to be selective 💅.

I tried my best to rank the movies but the result is a bit rough, since I love so many of them equally. 

Just in case someone wants to check them out, i cut back on the spoilers as much as possible.        

REC (2007)

I mean, do I need to say anything? This is just a found footage masterpiece.

Journalist extraordinaire Angela Vidal is merrily reporting on the nightly activities of Barcelona's firefighters, when she unexpectedly joins them on a call: they need to do a wellness check on an old lady, who has been heard yelling inside an apartment building.  

This sounds like an easy day on the job....  u n l e s s. 

This movie is very intense, and it's honestly insane how well choreographed the scenes are.  

EXHIBIT A  (2007)

Oh, how I love FF movies that explore human tragedies, and this is really one for the ages.

The King family is getting ready to move to a bigger house, since father Andy has finally landed a good job promotion… weirdly tho, as moving day approaches, he starts acting more and more strangely. Young daughter Judith decides to film his odd behaviour, in the hopes of making some sense of it and, potentially, help him through whatever is happening.     

The movie gets progressively more grim and the ending is   v e r y   hard to watch. As much as i love the paranormal takes on the genre, realistic plots like this one really hit different, and uncomfortably close to home at times...

A NECESSARY DEATH  (2008)

I’m not 100% sure this one classifies as horror, as it’s probably more of a drama, but it does contain a scene that made me physically cringe and, subsequently, pause the movie to make sure that it was actually a FALSE documentary cause “Jesus Christ what am I watching”.

The plot revolves around a crew of film students and the subject of their documentary: a suicidal man, whose life they are going to document for a month… up until the day he commits the final act.                      

What can  p o s s i b l y   go wrong while working on such an ethical nightmare of a project, well: plenty.

The movie poses a lot of ethical questions and I enjoyed seeing how the various characters, each with their own personalities, end up responding to the development of the events. 

Eventually, the movie takes a bit of an unexpected turn, which I really enjoyed, and the ending was great… well, as great as it can be.

 

 CREEP  (2014)

This movie tells the story of Aaron, a broke videographer who answers a weird job offer by a dying man called Joseph, looking to film a memorial for his son.

The first time I watched this film I was only 60% on board going into the ending cause… well, the protagonist could’ve been a tad bit brighter, but then….  IT  happens... AND THEN the final speech regarding Aaron’s kind nature completely drew me in, like: 

SURE, you know what, everything makes sense, that man would 100% behave like that, 10/10

 Additionally, Mark Duplass is an absolute blast.

I fucking hate the sequel btw.

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS  (2011)

To me, Grave Encounters is the   q u i n t e s s e n t i a l  found footage movie, it’s got everything: a haunted asylum, night vision, a troupe of paranormal investigators and, obviously, ghosts.

It’s a really good time and also, tag yourself cause: I’m cameraman T. C. Gibson. 

I swear I’ve never felt so connected to a character before. If I were stuck in such a situation, I’d also have absolutely zero patience: you'd hear me curse like a sailor and yell “let’s get FUCKING MOVING” every five seconds…  I’d be absolutely unbearable, and also absolutely on business.   

 

TROLL HUNTER  (2010)

A Swedish mockumentary about a man who works for the government as a “troll hunter”, with the mansion of managing the country’s troll population, while making sure it stays hidden from the public’s eye. 

It’s a huge environmentalist statement, a commentary on how we’ve been destroying other specie’s habitats and damaging their resources.                                                                                                         

I found it to be a really powerful movie, with some hard hitting lines and surprisingly good effects.

 

THE OUTWATERS  (2022)

Yes, I am one of the 3 people who genuinely liked this movie.

The plot revolves around a group of friends filming a music video in the desert when  c h a o s  ensues and, trust me when i say this, the word "c h a o s" is not enough to describe whatever tf is going on.

Most of the movie is seen from the POV of Robbie, the video director. Just as shit is starting to unfold, darling gets smacked violently in the head by a baddie, which caused me to automatically interpret all the things that followed, as hallucinations induced by the concussion.                                

Well you should’ve seen my face when, as the protagonist is looking at his brother covered in blood sitting on the wing of an airplane, it suddenly dawned on me:

Oh my god wait 

this is found footage  👁👄👁  this was inside the SD of a videocamera…… 

it’s not in his head, it’s real…………………………………………

I’m not gonna lie, it took me a second to get back on board after that, but I still loved it!

To be fair, I wouldn’t have minded being able to see more than 5% of the screen, the flashlight they use really has an abysmal cone of vision.

BUT ALSO, it brought to mind a very small Doraemon flashlight I own, which has the amazing feature of projecting images from the cartoon…

 wouldn’t it have been beautiful if they had used that instead?

Some honourable mentions:                                                             

GHOSTWATCH  (1992)

SAVAGELAND  (2015)

The entire population of an American border town has been massacred overnight. The investigations lead to the arrest of the sole survivor, but the photographs he took seem to tell a different story, one that is, sadly, very hard to believe...  

 One of the very first mockumentaries ever produced, it caused so much chaos among the TV viewers of the time, that the BBC swepped it under the rug completely, for decades. I recommend giving it a watch, if anything, to get acquainted with a different meaning of the term "glory whole".  

 

And, for the ones who wish to take a risk:

MURDER DEATH
KOREATOWN  (2020)

LIVESCREAM  (2018)

This one's for the gamers out there, especially the ones that fancy themselves a little livestream. In a way that is exquisitely canonical, this movie can be enojyed as a video on youtube. Is it absolutely amazing? Maybe not. Did i still enjoy it a lot? Absolutely.

  

  

You know how I mentioned having soft spot for FF movies that explore the human mind? Well, this one fell perfectly into that category... up until the last 10 minutes, when it completely threw me for a loop. 

Due to that I'm not fully sure how i feel about it, but the journey before the destination was great.